1827.] Historical and Literary. 595 



razor do not cut as deep as their sarcasms, it must Lave lost its edge by 

 disuse, and have become as blunt as a common oyster -knife. 



I might here dilate upon the various purposes for which nature provided 

 man with a hairy appendage to his chin, were not such a task rendered 

 quite superfluous by the three hundred and sixty -nine closely-printed folio 

 pages, which Marcus Antonius Ulmus, a physician of Padua, published on 

 the subject about three centuries ago; and by the erudite and ever me- 

 morable quarto, which Pierius, a priest of Rome, dedicated to Clement the 

 Seventh about the same time, in praise of its beauty, dignity, and unde- 

 niable holiness. Pagenstecher, the learned jurist of Steenvord, will 

 enlighten those who are anxious to inquire into its political merits and 

 judicial rights, and will prove, out of the mouths of mystics, moralists, 

 philosophers, theologians, arid historians, that it is given to man as a signal 

 ornament and distinction, and is denied to woman, on account of the 

 innate loquacity, dicacity, and garrulity of the sex, which keep her jaws 

 in such perpetual motion, as to afford no leisure time for a beard to sprout 

 thereon. I shall avoid all such speculative discussions, as unworthy of the 

 barber and the scholar; and, contenting myself with the humble fame of 

 an industrious compiler, shall seek nothing more than to form, out of the 

 slight and scattered fragments of history, a concise and curious, and I 

 hope not uninteresting, account of the decline and fall of the once bushy 

 honours of the human beard. 



If there be one people on the face of the earth whom I detest more 

 cordially than another, it is that people of opposite and contradictory 

 qualities, the Jews.* Obsequious and obdurate, superstitious and irre- 

 ligious, straining at gnats and swallowing camels, constantly amassing wealth, 

 and as constantly Jiving in the most squalid filth and beggary, they are at 

 once the humblest of slaves, and the most imperious of masters, to every 

 community in which they can obtain a footing. As I wish to get rid at 

 once of every disagreeable recollection, and as the very thought, much less 

 sight, of a Jew, excites my spleen and raises my disgust, I will begin, since 

 they trace back their history to times of which we have no other records 

 but theirs, by emptying my common-place book of all it contains relative 

 to their manner of decking and docking the beard. From their first 

 appearance, down to their final dissolution as an independent nation, they 

 held it in high respect and honour. The beard of Aaron, which streamed 

 like a grisly meteor to the wind, is always mentioned by their writers in 

 terms of hyperbolic praise as is also that of John the Baptist, who is 

 extolled by more than one of them for never having allowed a razor to 

 approach his throat. In imitation of these their prophets and their priests, 

 the Jews permitted their beards to grow to great length, and were fastidious 

 to a fault as to the mode of cutting and adorning it. Their history affords 

 a singular instance of their nicety of feeling on this point. When Hanun, 

 the Lord of the Ammonites, shaved off half the beard of David's messen- 

 gers, in derision of their master, the insult was felt to be so unpardonable, 

 that David made the shavelings tarry at Jericho till it had grown again, 

 being afraid lest their appearance with a board so marred and mutilated 



* For this dislike I have high authority. In Calvin's case [7 Rep. 17. a.] Lord Coke 

 says, "All infidels (among whom he reckoned the Jews, 2 Inst.507)are in law per- 

 pctui inimici, perpetual enemies; for the law presumes not that they will be converted, 

 that being" renwta pofentia, a remote possibility : for between them, as with the 

 devils, whose subjects they be, aud the Christian, there is perpetual hostility, and can 

 be no peace." 



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